The following post is from a series of blogs from the CBFVA Vision Team in preparation for the CBFVA General Assembly 2011. The theme of the assembly is “Beautiful Witness. Being Baptists Together. Doing God’s Mission” and the focal text is Luke 4:18-19.
This week’s blog was written by Rev. Tom Baynham, a Doctor of Ministry student at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.
+ + +
I had no intention of ever becoming a career clergy person. As a child, and later as a teenager, my focus was set on music and baseball. I played professional baseball in the spring and summer, and conducted an orchestra the rest of the year. However, to my surprise, my vocational direction changed in the fall of 1971.
My high school choir sang for an evening service at Richmond’s First Baptist Church. What an experience! A sanctuary twice the size of my parents’ church, the major hallway that seemed the length of a football field (it really wasn’t), and a massive pipe organ. Imagine my surprise when I realized that some of my closest friends from middle and high school attended worship there. Following that initial worship experience, I was invited to join the youth group, the contemporary and traditional youth choirs.
This was during a point in my pilgrimage where I wanted more from the church in terms of activities and spiritual growth. Over the next year and six months, I became engaged in the youth and music ministry of First Baptist; I was ready to make this place my spiritual home, except for one minor issue: would this predominantly white congregation accept a sixteen-year-old African-American teenager? As I struggled with making this decision, I began to sense an incredible movement of the Holy Spirit that I have experienced only two other times in my life. So on a bright Sunday morning in October 1973, I went forward…
The story doesn’t end there. For it was in this same sanctuary just three years later that I publicly responded to the call to ordained Christian ministry. My ministry pilgrimage has been unique in that I have served in white congregations from Indiana, to New Hampshire, to Virginia, and in Baptist, Disciples of Christ, United Methodist and Episcopal churches. The same Spirit, I believe, opened the doors to my places of ministry.
Robert Brearley ‘s commentary on this passage in Feasting on the Word (Year C, Volume 1), states that the same Holy Spirit that lead Jesus in saying no during the temptation story is the same Spirit that leads him to accept the mission given to him by God. Just as God anointed me in my call to ministry, He is waiting and wanting for you and others within your congregations to do the same. To know our mission and to understand what God has given us to do are as important to us as they were to Jesus. (1)
The theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.” As we prepare to cross the bridge together as Baptists—black and white—in March, let us do so with the anointing of God’s saints in ministry. The Holy Spirit comes when we have something to do for God and a time to do it. (2)
Blessings,
Tom Baynham
Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond
Footnotes: 1 and 2: Robert Brearley- Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 1: David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors (Westminster John Knox Press, 2009)
Originally posted at http://www.cbfva.org/anointing-tom-baynham